"From a renowned surgeon and historian with five decades of experience comes a remarkable history of surgery's development-spanning the Stone Age to the present day-blending meticulous medical studies with lively and skillful storytelling. There are not many events in life that can be as simultaneously life-frightening and life-saving as a surgical operation. Yet, in America, tens-of-millions of major surgical procedures are performed annually but...

"Surgeon Arnold Van de Laar uses his own experience and expertise to tell this engrossing history of surgery through 28 famous operations - from Louis XIV to JFK, and from Einstein to Houdini. From the story of the desperate man from seventeenth-century Amsterdam who grimly cut a stone out of his own bladder to Bob Marley's deadly toe, Under the Knife offers all kinds of fascinating and unforgettable insights into medicine and history via the operating...

"In 1841, a quiet, curious boy who stuttered when nervous committed to becoming a surgeon--a profession then more feared than respected. Through study, persistence, and careful research, Joseph Lister proved that unsanitary conditions contribute to infections. Despite others scoffing at his ideas, Lister slowly changed the way all surgeons work, saving countless lives"--

**A new unabridged recording** A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul...

"Tumors, injuries, natural malformations--there is almost no such thing as a non-emergency brain surgery when it comes to kids. For a pediatric neurosurgeon working in the medical minefield of the brain - in which every millimeter in every direction governs something that makes us essentially human--every day presents the challenge, the opportunity, to give a new lease on life to a child for whom nothing is yet determined and all possibilities still...

Devastated by the death of her boyfriend after a routine surgery, fourth-year medical student Lynn Pierce investigates the accident and discovers a string of suspicious deaths at the hospital.

"The weight of their family secrets could not have shaped Pearl and Ruby Crenshaw any differently. Ruby's a runner, living in Dallas and only reluctantly talking to their mother, Birdie, when she calls from prison. Pearl is still living in her mother's fixer-upper and finds herself facing a line in the sand: her weight is threatening to kill her. She's hundreds of pounds beyond the point where she can celebrate her curves or benefit from the body...

"In Ticker, Texas Monthly executive editor and two-time National Magazine Award winner Mimi Swartz takes readers behind the scenes of perhaps the greatest medical and technological quest of our time, as she follows pioneering heart surgeon O. H. "Bud" Frazier and his partner, Dr. Billy Cohn, in Frazier's lifelong effort to develop, perfect, and successfully implant an artificial heart in patients whose hearts are failing. In Ticker, renowned journalist...

"A deeply candid and refreshingly spirited memoir of identity lost and found-from the star of the iconic film Dirty Dancing"--